This is the only book-length study of the seventeenth-century poet, John Cleveland. He was best known for his poems in a metaphysical style, and often reckoned to have been England’s most popular poet for a brief period. Cleveland was rhetoric reader at Cambridge the year before John Milton assumed the same office. He was also a serious political essayist and supported King Charles in the Civil War. His achievement as a satirist is one of the focal points of this book.